Dual Wielding Kindle Scribes

[-]meedstrom2y*70

One problem with the Kindle Scribe is that I couldn’t switch from the note-taking application to the book I was reading very quickly. It would take about 5 to 10 seconds in total to press all the menu buttons

Ah, yes! With the reMarkable (another e-reader), I have a trick: I installed an app switcher so I could merely use a gesture to switch between a writing app and reading app.

I quite appreciated having a single slate to read and write on, in environments like the bus and the beach. Anyway, the software was somewhat buggy... and then I lost my stylus pen and then the replacement stylus pen. So now I just use a paper notepad, which I find works nicely.

I have a question. Would a paper notepad have worked for you instead of a second device? What's better with the device?

[-]mesaoptimizer2y30

Would a paper notepad have worked for you instead of a second device? What’s better with the device?

Answered here, but TLDR is joy of using the Scribe, aversion to using notepads, and a worry of losing logs of what I wrote if written on paper.

[-]meedstrom2y10

I can understand that, since you keep the handwritings as they are.

Just sharing my own process, but I like the notepad because it's ephemeral... I scribble what I learn, almost illegibly, and later type it up more nicely in my org-roam knowledge base, driven by sheer motivation to liberate myself from that stack of loose scribblings.

That way I get the upside of writing on paper (you learn better), but skip the downside that they're hard to look up.

[-]mesaoptimizer2y20

This is very interesting. I used to use org-roam and also experimented with other zettelkasten software over the past few years, but eventually it all grew very overwhelming because of the problem of updating notes. The bigger your note pile, the bigger the blocker (it seems to me at least) of updating your notes as you get a better understanding of reality.

Could you elaborate more on your setup, especially your knowledge base and how you use it?

[-]meedstrom2y10

Hmm. About 50% of my note pile can be browsed on https://edstrom.dev/. I have some notes on the method under https://edstrom.dev/zvjjm/slipbox-workflow.

How large did your note pile get before it felt overwhelming?

It's true that sometimes I see things I wrote that are clearly outdated or mistaken, but that's sort of fun because I see that I leveled up!

It's also embarrassing to have published mistakes online, so I've learned to make fewer unqualified claims and instead just document the path by which I arrived to my current conclusion. Such documentations are essentially timeless, as johnswentworth explains at How To Write Quickly While Maintaining Epistemic Rigor.

Still, I'm keeping more and more notes private over time, because of my increasing quality standards. But ignoring the matter of private/public, then I don't perceive updating as a problem yet, no. I don't mind having very outdated notes lying around, especially if they're private anyway. When I rediscover them, they will be effortless to update.

[-]Seth Herd2y40

To your point about e-ink screens reducing eyestrain: white-on-black text may do the same thing. It's reducing the light hitting your eyeballs by a factor of ten to a hundred. I've read books on a large phone screen in dark mode for a long time (since Kindle for smartphones has existed, I guess) and experienced zero perceptible eyestrain.

This has nothing to do with the distraction-reducing portion of your post, nor the handwriting notes portion.

[-]meedstrom2y71

There is much bikeshedding about eyestrain. I've seen convincing arguments, especially from older hackers, that a white background is actually less strainful for the eyes. I forgot what the arguments were---will write them down next time---but I don't think it's as simple as the amount of light hitting the eye. Currently I'd advise just trusting in personal experience.

And maybe experiment with increasing ambient light rather than reduce light from the screen.

[-]Seth Herd2y40

Agreed that it's not as simple as light hitting the eye. I've also tried to work on external monitors that are relatively far away for neutral focal distance. But I couldn't find any good research or even theory on it.

FWIW, the majority of my book reading in white on black has been done in the dark in bed before sleeping, but at low contrast.

[-]jenn2y30

thanks for writing this! can you say a little bit more about the process of writing notes on a scribe? I've been interested in getting one, but my understanding is that e-ink displays are good for mostly static displays, and writing notes on it requires it to update in real-time and will drain the battery fairly quickly? my own e-reader is from like, 2018, so idk if there's been significant updates. how often do you need to charge them when you're using them?

[-]mesaoptimizer2y40

The Kindle Scribe, IIRC has a 18 ms latency for rendering whatever you write on it using the Wacom-like pen. I believe that was the lowest latency you could get at the time (the Apple Pencil on iPads supposedly has a latency of 7-10 ms, but they use some sort of software to predict what you'll do next, so that doesn't count in my opinion).

I found the experience of writing notes on the Kindle Scribe great! It was about as effortless as writing on paper, with the advantage of being able to easily erase what I wrote with the flip of the Premium Pen. There are tail annoyances, but that didn't seem to me to be worse than the tail annoyances of using physical pen and paper (whether gel ink, fountain pens, or ball point pens).

Writing on the Scribe does drain your battery faster. The number that comes to mind is that you can write on it continually for about eight hours before you wholly drain the battery, while if you only read on it, you don't need to charge the Kindle for weeks.

I recommend the My Deep Guide Youtube channel for in-depth information about various e-readers and if you want to get up to speed on the current e-reader zeitgeist.

[-]Felix J Binder2y21

There are a number of other eink tablets on the market, most of which run Android and are therefore a good amount more customizable. For example, I'm using a Boox Note Air (https://shop.boox.com/collections/all/products/boox-note-air3), which has a similar screen and runs Android. It also comes with a split screen functionality, so you could connect a bluetooth keyboard, have the book open on one side and a vim emulator on the other. That's pretty close to my workflow for reading books/papers.

[-]Ariel_2y10

I have the Boox Nova Air (7inch) for nearly 2 years now - a bit small for reading papers but great for books and blog posts. You can run google play apps, and even set up a google drive sync to automatically transfer pdfs/epubs onto it. At some point I might get the 10inch version (the Note Air).

Another useful feature is taking notes inside pdfs, by highlighting and then handwriting the note into the Gboard handwrite-to-text keyboard. Not as smooth as on an iPad, but pretty good way to annotate a paper.

[-]Alex_Altair2y20

The e-ink tablet market has really diversified recently. I'd recommend that anyone interested look around at the options. My impression is that the Kindle Scribe is one of the least good ones (which doesn't mean it's bad).

[-]Raemon2y20

Can you say more about "couldn't stand the kindle interface for books/notes?". I'm trying to figure out if I should try this and don't quite have a model of why it didn't work for you (and whether that'd translate to me)

[-]mesaoptimizer2y30

couldn’t stand the kindle interface for books/notes

This is in comparison to using Emacs. When using Emacs as my interface for reading books and writing notes,

I can use a familiar UNIX file system to store my books as PDFs and EPUBs. I can easily back it up and interact with my collection using other tools I have (which is a real benefit of using a general purpose computing device). With the Kindle, creating and managing collections (an arbitrary category-based way of organizing your documents) is awkward enough (you need to select one book at a time and add it to a collection) given my experience with the last Kindle Scribe firmware that I just relied on the search bar to search for book titles.
When using Emacs, I can do a full text search of my notes file simply by pressing "s" (a keybind) and then typing a string. In contrast, while the notes written on the Scribe can be exported as PDFs, you don't have the ability to search your notes. This wasn't a dealbreaker for me, though, to be clear.

It is a bit hard to point at the things that make me want to use Emacs for it, because a load-bearing element is my desire to do everything in Emacs. Emacs has in-built documentation for its internals and almost every part of it is configurable -- which means you can optimize your setup to be exactly as you like it. It feels like an extension of you, eventually.

This also somewhat drives my desire to use a simple and (eventually, given enough investment) understandable operating system that doesn't shift beneath my feet. And given that both the interface and the operating system of the Kindle Scribe are opaque and (eventually) leaky abstractions, I feel less enthusiastic about investing my efforts into adapting myself to it.

[-]Raemon2y20

oh, one question: if you mostly don't look at your notes afterwards, why do you need a kindle scribe for them instead of a notebook?

[-]Elizabeth2y51

data point: when I got my scribe, I was shocked at how good writing on it felt. It might or might not beat my favorite pen on the best possible paper, but it certainly beat anything less than that. I've tried the remarkable, and ipencil-on-ipad and didn't have this experience. Maybe that's because the scribe hasn't seen much use and it will feel worse once it accumulates dirt, but I think Amazon did a really good job with the feel of it.

I also find there's a difference emotionally between "this note is not optimized for reference and will be a pain in the ass to find later" vs "this note will disappear from history the moment you look away". Knowing I could find something if I really really needed it frees up my brain from having to retain it.

[-]mesaoptimizer2y30

Based on a focusing-style attempt at understanding why, it seems like there's a certain sense of pleasure and delight associated with using the Kindle Scribe to write (and read) on, in my mind, and a sense of inelegance and awkwardness associated with writing on paper. Whatever experiences, beliefs, and sense of aesthetics underlies this is probably the driving factor.

I did have access to notebooks and pens and whiteboards when I bought the second Kindle Scribe, but hesitated to use any of them for writing down my thoughts. One thing that comes to mind when I imagine such alternatives is that I fear losing a log of what I thought and wrote, and I didn't imagine doing so if I wrote it on the Scribe.

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Dual Wielding Kindle Scribes

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The Display

Single-purpose devices enhance focus

One to read, another to write on

Moving on